spent an hour on line with Nvidia support, downloaded the latest drivers for the GTX980,but after repeated restarts, etc, LUMION still is not recognizing the Nvidia card. Upon starting LUMION, the app says I have 1 gig or less of memory and a very slow graphic cards and that I should upgrade....the benchmark says -1.

This is a new machine with all the recommendations that LUMION suggested ... before I purchase LUMION, I need to get this video card resolved.

Hi mrdcon, please click here (https://support.lumion.com/hc/en-us/articles/360003475133-How-do-you-attach-a-diagnostics-report-to-a-post-) to attach a diagnostics report, so we can take a look at your system.

This quote from your DXDIag file is also interesting:"DxDiag Previously: Crashed in Direct3D (stage 2). Re-running DxDiag with "dontskip" command line parameter or choosing not to bypass information gathering when prompted might result in DxDiag successfully obtaining this information"

Anyway, let's try to figure out why your GTX 980 isn't being recognised as a Display Device in DirectX. First of all, let's rule out any physical issues with the card, so bear with me while we go through the basics. :)

1) Which motherboard has this PC got? (full product name and number)

2) Which PCI-Express slot is the card inserted into? (Unscrew the side of the PC case and attach a photo of it if possible)

3) Can you confirm that the GTX 980 graphics card is connected to the monitor via a HDMI, DVI or DisplayPort cable?

I had a look at the manual for the motherboard and can confirm that the GTX 980 is installed in the right slot (PCI-Express E2), the 2 x power cables are connected and the DVI cable from your monitor is hooked up to the right socket. In other words, we can rule out basic hardware issues.

Next steps:

1) Please open the Device Manager and verify that the GTX 980 is the only graphics card listed in the Display Adapters section.

2) Then double-click on the GTX 980 in the Display Adapters section and post 4 screenshots, one of each tab (General, Driver, Details, Resources).

There's quite a few search results on Google when I typed in the error message from DXDiag but lots of dead-ends.

At this stage, I don't know if it's caused by DirectX or the graphics card, and in the 7 years that I have worked for Act-3D I have never seen a case like yours. All I can say is that it has got nothing to do with Lumion, so you might have more luck contacting Microsoft and/or Nvidia about this problem. :-\

Did you buy this PC from a shop or did you build it yourself?

In any case, I'm pretty much out of ideas for now. My colleague Peter might have some other things to try when his shift starts in a few hours.

As a last ditch attempt, I suppose you could see what happens if you move the card to the PCIe 2.0 x16 Slot (instead of the 3.0 slot).

It's the one that's marked PCI_E4 on this diagram of your motherboard:

That's good news - this case should be covered by their warranty (assuming they also installed Windows 7 for you).

You should forward the DirectX screenshot below to their support team (and include your other DXDiag screenshot with the error message too). It's not supposed to look like this on a brand new PC. You paid good money for it, so it should work straight out of the box. If you install more software on this PC, you'll notice that it can't run 3D games and CAD software that rely on DirectX. Try to run 3DMark Basic Edition (available at the bottom of this page (http://www.futuremark.com/benchmarks/3dmark)) to see if my assumption is correct.

Since you bought the PC from NEWEGG, it's best to leave everything in its place, so you can return it if they can't resolve this problem. You shouldn't have to opt for a slower PCI-Express slot just because of this DirectX error.

Sorry, I was still editing the post above so you probably didn't see the latest changes I made.

Just to be on the safe side, since this is a brand new PC: Can you confirm that Windows 7 is up to date and that there are no more updates to be installed?

1) Go to Start -> Control Panel -> Windows Update.2) Check for updates.3) Install all available updates.4) After the updates are installed, restart your computer.5) After the restart repeat the steps above again until no more updates are available.

Then try to run the benchmarking application 3DMark Basic Edition (available at the bottom of this page (http://www.futuremark.com/benchmarks/3dmark)), just to confirm that your PC can't run other DirectX applications.

If confirmed, a PC that can't run DirectX applications is basically broken and means that NEWEGG either has to repair it at their cost or replace it with a PC that does work.

P.S. Your PC specs are very good, so once this has been fixed I'm sure you'll be very happy with the performance in Lumion.

Once Windows 7 has no more updates to install, try to run the benchmarking application 3DMark Basic Edition (available at the bottom of this page (http://www.futuremark.com/benchmarks/3dmark)), just to confirm that your PC can't run other DirectX applications.

In very rare cases, it might be that an onboard switch needs to be set for the graphics card. In most cases if a graphics card is in one of the PCI slots it will allow the system to auto-switch to the card from any onboard graphics. That's really something for the suppliers to confirm though.

By the way, your version of DXDiag is quite old (presumably because you haven't fully updated Windows 7 yet).

It might be worth (re-)installing DirectX (if it will let you).

Click here (https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/download/details.aspx?id=8109) to download the DirectX installer, run it to extract the installation files and then double-click on "DXSETUP.exe" to start the installer.